Vehicles are often driven repetitively along a certain route. If a user of a vehicle for example commutes between his home and his workplace, he may choose to drive the same route for several days every week over periods of months or years. Along the route there may be objects he needs to or would like to take pictures of. Situations may arise, when he would like to take several pictures of the same object over a period of time. For example, he may want to obtain documentation of the development of a construction site next to the road, or he may want to collect information regarding which part of the year a particular passage of the road is flooded.
It may be inconvenient or associated with risks to stop and exit the vehicle at the time when he would like to take pictures of an object or position along his route. It may also be associated with risks if he shares focus between driving and taking pictures manually with a camera from a position within the vehicle. In addition, it may be difficult to take similar pictures from the same position using a hand held camera.
The document WO 2011053335 A1 discloses a method for detecting e.g. objects along a navigable street. The method includes placing a GPS system with a user interface screen in a vehicle. The GPS is connected to a forward facing camera for capture still images. Following capture the images are geocoded, and the result is a series of geocoded pictures along a route.
The document US 2008051997 A1 discloses a system for creating and providing interactive access to a street-based photographic image database. Images are automatically collected at incremental distances along each of a plurality of streets of travel, each of the images are indexed with respect to unique correlation data.
If many vehicles equipped with the image capture systems travel along the same streets the result is a large number of images captured for the same or similar location collected by several different vehicles. In those cases, US 2008051997 A1 suggests to reduce the number of images taken at a certain location.
The document US2010141736 A1 discloses a method for assembling a database of geographically related images. The method employs a computer, which is interconnected with a GPS transceiver and distance measurement means and a digital camera arranged on a moving vehicle for taking a plurality of geographic location related images. The camera takes a photo which is stored for post-processing. The post-processing determines a path traveled by the vehicle using the positions and distance measurements and assigns an accurate geographic location and orientation to each photo. The method is useful in building a database of geographically related images.